Fergus OConnell - Stuff I Wish Id Known When I Started Working

FERGUS OCONNELL

This edition first published 2015
2015 Fergus O'Connell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O'Connell, Fergus.
Stuff I wish I'd known when I started working / Fergus O'Connell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-85708-570-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-85708-568-9 (ebk)
ISBN 978-0-85708-569-6 (ebk) 1. Success in business. 2. Job satisfaction.
3. Achievement motivation. I. Title.
HF5386.O253 2014
650.1dc23

2014029801

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780857085702 (paperback) ISBN 9780857085689 (ebk)
ISBN 9780857085696 (ebk)

Cover design by Wiley

For Jenny Ng,
my friend and the best co-pilot any author
could possibly wish for

This book had a simple and rather obvious birth.

I was thinking one day about how Id really like to be nineteen again. Nineteen but to have all the knowledge about the world that I have gained gained from people Ive met or been involved with, gained from situations Ive been in or experienced, gained from the countless dumb mistakes that Ive made.

It occurred to me then that a book that talked about this knowledge but in a business context would be a useful thing. Ive made lots of mistakes in my working life some big, plenty small. If a book could stop other people from making those mistakes then that probably would be a good enough reason to destroy a lot of trees and make a book. Youll be able to make plenty mistakes of your own. You dont have to make the ones I made.

Mistakes involve waste sometimes appalling amounts of it. And waste, of course, is one of the big problems in the world today. I dont just mean rubbish/garbage, but waste of time, effort, resources, money, people, lives. If a book like this could stop some of that waste then the destruction of the trees not really a good thing would have been repaid by these savings which could be a very good thing indeed.

That was good enough for me. I pitched it to Darin, my agent. He liked it. We pitched it to the good folks at Wiley. They liked it. I got to work and here we are.

Thank you for buying and I hope it makes a difference.

Fergus OConnell

Ireland, 2015

Maybe youve started working for somebody else a company or organization. Maybe youve started your own thing. In either case I think youll find much that will be of use to you in this book. (And given that Ive done both I feel Im suitably qualified to be your guide.)

If you have never started your own business, dont discount the chapters that appear to be targeted at the entrepreneur or business owner. Greater minds than mine have pointed out how the era of a job for life is long over that ship has sailed. More and more, organizations are encouraging their employees to think like entrepreneurs. Get closer to the customer. Take risks. Be passionate about projects. How else can I add value? What value do I add? Why do I deserve a salary rise? And so on.

What Ive done is to rack my brains and come up with (whats turned out to be) 24 subjects about which I wish Id known more when I started working. Thus, the book has 24 chapters in alphabetical order.

The book is intended to be quick and easy to read, punchy and concise. The chapters are all pretty short. I take as my starting point that youre like the rest of us that youve got far more to do than youll ever have time to do it. So you dont want to spend too much time messing around with this book.

While you can certainly read it from cover to cover and would get benefit from doing that my sense is that the most effective way to use the book would be to dip into it. Youre asked to attend a meeting, for example, so you check the chapter on meetings. Youre asked to take on a new project but before you start calling meetings, sending out emails, banging stuff into your computer, hiring people, making Gantt charts in Microsoft Project and so on, you take a few minutes out to read the chapter on projects.

I would pretty much guarantee that the time you spend on this book would be repaid several or even many times over by time you wouldnt waste as a result. Not a bad deal, eh?

Each chapter is short and focused on a very specific subject. The main body of each chapter talks about the issues associated with that subject. The book is very much a how-to book so it then goes on to tell you how to deal with these issues. In other words, it identifies some specific actions that you can take straight away in order to learn the lesson of the chapter.

Littered throughout the book are extracts from carefully selected commencement speeches where the great and the good give advice to graduating university students. In commencement speeches, the speaker recounts past experiences and tries to crystallize the lessons they learned from these. Essentially, these lessons, which they are now passing on to people about to go into the workplace, are the things they wish theyd known when they started working.